The arrangement with AT&T came as the company pursued an $85 billion merger with Time Warner that required sign off from federal regulators.

Internal company documents obtained by the Washington Postshowed that Cohen was hired three days after Trump was sworn in — and that his contract required him to consult specifically on the merger. That deal is now in the hands of a federal judge, who will decide if it would create an illegal monopoly.

In a statement Friday, AT&T said it was Cohen who approached the company during the presidential transition. Cohen's pitch: "He was going to leave the Trump Organization and do consulting for a select few companies that wanted his opinion on the new President and his administration — the key players, their priorities, and how they think," AT&T said.

Stephenson said the arrangement was legal and “entirely legitimate.” But, he added, “the fact is, our past association with Cohen was a serious misjudgment.”

The company official responsible for hiring Cohen, senior executive vice president Bob Quinn, is retiring, Stephenson said. Quinn accompanied Stephenson to meet with the president-elect at Trump Tower in January 2017 — 11 days before AT&T hired Cohen.

The company's lobbying operation will now report to AT&T General Counsel David McAtee, Stephenson said. "David's number one priority is to ensure every one of the individuals and firms we use in the political arena are people who share our high standards and who we would be proud to have associated with AT&T," he said.

Cohen, the subject of a criminal investigation by prosecutors in New York, has acknowledged paying $130,000 to the adult film star actress Stormy Daniels before the election to buy her silence about an alleged relationship with Trump in 2006.

This week several companies, including AT&T and Swiss drug maker Novartis, said they paid Cohen for insight about the new administration and to gain access to Trump officials.

The White House said Friday that those deals didn't have any influence on Trump — noting that the Justice Department has not dropped its opposition to the AT&T-Time Warner merger.

"I think that this further proves that the president is not going to be influenced by special interests," press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said. "This is the definition of draining the swamp that the president talked about in the campaign."

She would not comment on whether the president thought it was appropriate that his personal lawyer would accept payment from companies seeking to influence him.

A deputy press secretary, Raj Shah, also noted that Trump signed an executive order barring former administration officials from lobbying. But those rules wouldn't apply to Cohen, who never served in government and never registered as a lobbyist.

AT&T hired Cohen at $50,000 a month for 12 months before the contract expired in December — a month before Cohen's involvement in the Stormy Daniels payoff came to light in the Wall Street Journal.

In addition to the Time Warner merger, AT&T has also lobbied the Trump administration for tax cuts and a repeal of net neutrality rules that require telecom companies to treat all Internet traffic equally.

AT&T officials have previously said Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office asked about the payments to Cohen last November as part of the investigation into whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russian agents in the 2016 presidential election.